


Being a Survivor

by AliceMcGee



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: 62nd hunger games, Gen, Quarter Quell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-10 16:29:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8924200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AliceMcGee/pseuds/AliceMcGee
Summary: A short story of Enobaria's life





	

Enobaria was a survivor - that was a fact no one could deny. After all, it was the first thing she ever did - surviving a complicated birth that cost her mother a life. Then she survived her first years being raised by her depressed father who tried to drown the pain of losing his wife in illegal white liquor and blaming his daughter for everything bad one minute, and president Snow the other. Which wasn’t a safe thing to do. One day when she was seven, peacekeepers came. They took away her father, but they didn't quite know what to do with a little, malnourished girl looking at them with hard tearless eyes, not a trace of fear on her face, just cold curiosity.  
A rich family with a girl her age took her in - not without conditions, of course. She was to undergo serious training to become a career and to volunteer if their real daughter would be reaped. She was an outsider in the training, bullied by virtually everyone. She never made a friend. And she survived that.  
She went to arena not ten years later. There she did what she had to - she killed, she hid, she begged for mercy when a boy from district five was about to kill her. And when he hesitated, she jumped at him, taking him down. There wasn't enough time to grab anything and use it as a weapon - so she used her teeth. She would never forget the light dying in his eyes, the taste of his blood in her mouth, the warmth of it running down her chin, soaking in her hair and clothes. But she survived that, too.  
And then the two more cannon sounds. The announcement of her victory. The viewing of the Games. Coming home and having no one to greet her because her adoptive parents were too scared of her now. Which should have been satisfying, but it wasn’t.  
There were nightmares, yes, but she survived them. And she survived all the men touching her body because president Snow allowed them. She survived him threatening her and everyone she loved - maybe because she didn’t really love anyone, not even herself. But she still didn’t want to die.  
Her ripping the throat of that district five boy (she never allowed her brain to remember his name) became the most famous moment from her Games and her stylist decided to use it just before her Victory Tour. He had her teeth sharpened into fangs and inlaid in gold, so her smile became one of the most terrifying thing she’d ever seen. She dreaded mirrors ever since. But she survived again. And she tasted her own blood so many times before she got used to her new teeth that the sensation became dull and didn’t remind her of anything anymore. More Games came and hers gradually almost disappeared from TV. But she still couldn’t escape, she still had to go to Capitol every year, even though she refused to be a mentor for her district’s tributes. She was expected to give comments about current Games and current tributes and to show her teeth and there were still president’s friends (or enemies, for that matter) who were intrigued by her and her dangerous smile. She learned how to live with it.  
So when the third Quarter Quell was announced, she wasn't scared, not really. Maybe there were sobs in the night coming from her room, but there was nobody in her house in Victor's Village to hear them, so it didn’t matter.   
Then she got reaped and now she was on the train again, heading for the Capitol and the reflection in the mirror was no longer the scariest thing she could think of.   
But she was a survivor. This too shall pass. She didn’t escape her first Games to be killed in another. She. Will. Survive.


End file.
